**Please read this entire message**
—
Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):
* Rule #2 – Questions must seek objective explanations
* Medical questions are not allowed on ELI5, and it is a terrible idea to ask for on the internet in general! If you have medical questions, please see an actual doctor rather than asking strangers on the internet (Rule 2).
—
If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe this submission was removed erroneously**, please [use this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20thread?&message=Link:%20https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kmhhby/-/%0A%0APlease%20answer%20the%20following%203%20questions:%0A%0A1.%20The%20concept%20I%20want%20explained:%0A%0A2.%20Link%20to%20the%20search%20you%20did%20to%20look%20for%20past%20posts%20on%20the%20ELI5%20subreddit:%0A%0A3.%20How%20is%20this%20post%20unique:) and we will review your submission.
Here’s a slightly different question for any pharmacists on this thread: When I was going through menopause, for several weeks I bled so heavily that I literally could not leave the house for more than an hour or so. I became depressed and finally called my doctor’s office for help.
The nurse practitioner who took my call told me to take a boatload of ibuprofen according to a certain schedule. Offhand I can’t remember what dosage she recommended, but it was significantly above what’s listed on the label. It worked!
But it seems counterintuitive, because ibuprofen is an NSAID, which you’re not supposed to take if you have a bleeding tendency. So how did it stop extraordinarily heavy menopausal bleeding? And why was it safe to do that if it’s not safe to go over the recommended dosage for pain relief?
2 words: Blood Level. The idea is to get enough of the medicine into your blood at one time to have an effect. Most drugs have a linear relationship of medication dose and medication effect but they also tend to need to get over a certain threshold before they have any noticeable effect. So 2 ibuprofen gets 400mg into you at once which then gets eliminated over a predictable amount of time until your blood level drops to the point that the manufacturer recommends another dose to get your blood level back up to an effective level.
Once you have it up to an effective level, yes, you could take one every 2-3 hours and probably achieve the same thing, but that is making the directions unnecessarily complicated.
I usually take 1 to see if it causes a placebo effect. If the pain/headache goes away in less than 30 minutes it is probably not from the pill. If I still have a headache but not as bad I will take one more in 30 minutes. Then do the 2 in 4 hours if needed. But with tylenol right now because I cant take aspirin or ibuprofen for a few months.
Some of it is about the absorbance rates to the drug into your blood stream when compared against the ‘effective dose’ (while also not producing harmful side effects) needed to actually trigger the receptor responses. Now couple all that craziness with your liver turning it into a form that your kidneys can flush out. (This is probably the simplest way one can talk about pharmacokinetics).
So you have to take enough to take effect, while it’s fighting a constant ‘draining’ effect of it getting removed from your body due to liver/kidneys. If you take less than the lowest does it might have a reduced effect. So you might reduce your benefit meanwhile still putting pressure on your liver/kidneys.
Latest Answers